Suburban teaching methods are failing township children, discouraging teachers: What needs to change

Image source: Freepik

As a long-serving public servant in education, I have visited classrooms in Khayelitsha, Delft, and New Crossroads. I have spoken with teachers who arrive early, leave late, and spend their nights worrying about children who show signs of trauma, hunger, or neglect. I’ve worked with practitioners who operate in overcrowded classrooms, under impossible odds. These educators are not abandoning the profession because they lack commitment. They are being driven out by a system that refuses to evolve with the times.

Inadequately equipped

One of the biggest problems is our failure to equip teachers with the right conceptual tools. The theories we continue to impose on practitioners — Piaget’s cognitive development stages, Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, Erikson’s psychosocial stages — were developed in contexts of stability, structure, and safety.

These assumptions do not hold for South Africa’s township classrooms where children face daily exposure to violence, food insecurity, loss, and family instability.

Daily reality

Take the case of Thabo, a 4-year-old in Khayelitsha who lost her mother and lives in a shack with her grandmother. She does not speak much, withdraws when adults raise their voices, and cries during nap time if left alone. What does Piaget say about that? What developmental stage explains the effects of grief, fear, and social isolation?

Or Peter, age 5, in Delft. He is aggressive, hyperactive, and quick to anger. He comes from a home where conflict is constant. His behaviour is labelled “difficult”, yet it is a textbook trauma response. And Susan, age 6, arrives tired each morning after caring for her baby brother because her mother leaves for work before dawn. She is adultified — bright, but burdened.

The system does not prepare teachers for these children. Instead, it prepares them to implement theory as if childhood is universal and unaffected by socioeconomic conditions. But South African children are not growing up in a textbook — they are growing up in crisis.

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Teachers excluded from policy, curriculum development

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The broader problem is that education planning itself is divorced from these realities. Teachers are not included in policy development or curriculum design. They are treated as implementers of someone else’s ideas. Planning is remote, centralised, and, frankly, naive.

In the many decades I spent in the education system, there wasn’t a single occasion when teachers were called to explain their challenges in townships. Complex decisions are made in boardrooms with limited knowledge of what really happens on the ground.

This creates a dangerous gap: planners defend the system with statistics; teachers battle with its consequences. Officials debate learning outcomes; teachers navigate trauma without support. Education becomes about policy performance rather than human development.

What we need is a new conversation — a radical rethinking of what pedagogy looks like in South African classrooms. We must embrace trauma-informed, context-sensitive, and culturally grounded approaches. That means:

• Equipping teachers to interpret behaviour through a trauma lens rather than a deficit lens.
  
• Providing practical tools — like sensory play, emotional coaching, and storytelling — not just lesson plans.
  
• Valuing cultural knowledge and community participation, not just imported academic models.
  
• Treating teachers as intellectuals, not just labourers.

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Rewriting the pedagogy

But it must go further. We need a new pedagogy, one that originates from the lived experiences of township children — a pedagogy that shapes curriculum development itself.

Currently, the curriculum, despite its universal recognition and theoretical sophistication, does not work for township children. It speaks a language foreign to their everyday lives, assumes a middle-class household context, and measures intelligence through standards irrelevant to their survival realities. It alienates learners who don’t see themselves in the content and confuses teachers who are forced to translate theory that doesn’t fit the world in front of them.

Is anyone listening?

This mismatch is more than technical — it is political. It reveals whose knowledge counts, whose lives matter, and who gets to decide what education should look like. A truly inclusive education system must centre the stories, struggles, and strengths of children like Thabo, Peter and Susan — not marginalise them.

If nearly half our teachers are ready to walk away, that is not an individual failure — it is an institutional one. The system is not working because it is not listening.

We must begin by listening — to the teacher in the classroom, to the child in distress, to the community whose knowledge we have long ignored. If we do that, we can begin to build an education system that doesn’t just survive — but transforms.